


Never the Things That You Do

by Island_of_Reil



Category: The Lantern Bearers - Rosemary Sutcliff
Genre: Canon Compliant, Domestic Violence, Dubcon Kissing, F/M, Face Slapping, Period-Typical Homophobia, Spoilers, marital rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-19
Updated: 2013-04-19
Packaged: 2017-12-08 22:45:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/766924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aquila takes Ness back to their bothy as the storm begins. This is what happens there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never the Things That You Do

**Author's Note:**

> Please heed the tags and warnings. This story depicts what would be considered rape in a real-world situation, although for the purposes of fanfic I am not sure if it is dubcon or noncon.
> 
> For those who have not read _The Lantern Bearers_ , the scene I quote at the beginning, the jumping-off point for this fic, is almost precisely halfway through the novel. Therefore, there are spoilers for the first half. 
> 
> I believe that how I have characterized both Aquila and Ness is consistent with canon. For what it's worth, the timing of this would be consistent with the conception of their son Flavian.

> _"It was not that you took me, but the **way** that you took me—" She began to laugh on a hard, mocking note that made him long to hit her; and as though her wild laughter had called it up, and there was some kinship between her and the coming storm, a long, dank breath of wind came sighing up the cleft, thick with the smell of thunder and the thin, honey sweetness of the blackthorn flowers, and a flicker of lightning played between the dark masses of the mountains. "It was not that you laughed at Rhyannid about the pig, but the **way** that you laughed. It is never the things that you do, but the way that you do them. You took me from my father's hearth as you might have taken a dog—no, not a dog; I have seen you playing with Cabal's ears and gentling him under the chin—as you might have taken a kist or a cooking-pot that you did not much value._
> 
> _… "Let you go back and sleep dry in the warm deerskins. I like storms; did I not tell you? This is my storm, and I am waiting for it. It will be bonnier company than you are to me."_
> 
> _— Chapter 13, "The Empty Hut"_

Ness was strong, in body and in anger. Aquila feared he would lose his grip on her wrists as she fought him, but she spent her anger quickly in the effort. She would not be loose of him so easily, he knew she knew. The hate and desolation in her face said as much. She leaned into him and her body went slack.

"Come, Ness," he said. His determination to best her had dissolved in pity. 

He held to just her right wrist as they picked their careful way up the stones back to the bothy. Aquila shut the door just in time for the first gust of rain to strike it.

Once inside, Ness stood in the center of it, unmoving. Her black hair was wind-wild about her face, which was unusually pale. Her brown eyes seemed to take up all of it; they were glassy as if with unshed tears, and they stared into nothing. The roof and the walls rattled about her still form as if all her life-force had fled into the storm-clouds.

Aquila stood nearby. He thought of Flavia, wondered if Ness could comb sparks from her own hair. He thought of the lad he used to be, laughing and at his ease, before a serpent in the guise of a Red Fox loosed a horror from the east upon his family and his fate. That lad would have known what to say to her now, how to touch her. But, then, that lad would have been able to not only take Ness from Powys, but take her in a way that eased her heart, if it didn't inspire her love. 

He wondered if it might be better to leave her stand until she came to herself, but, little as he loved her, he could not bear to undress and climb under the deerskins of their bed while she stood, near-mad, in the middle of the bothy. He didn't trust her not to stand there all night and into the next day.

He laid his hand on her cheek, gently, he thought.

He had not been with a woman in … ten years? Since before the smiling, loving lad died giving birth to the bitter, hating man? When he lay alone and his body reminded him that it was still alive, even if his heart was not, he would relieve his need by hand, perfunctorily and thinking of no one all the while. The beds of other men held no allure for him, but the thought of being encircled in a woman's arms, even a whore's, filled him with terror. Soft skin and soft voice and soft touch might slip through a crack in the wall he had begun to build about himself when he was first taken to Jutland.

Perhaps his hand was too firm against Ness's skin. Perhaps he should not have touched her at all, in this state. As soon as he did, she came back to life — fierce, incandescent, raging life. She knocked his hand away, hard. A flash of lightning blanched her face, the eyes in it like flints, just as she spat into his own.

It was almost a relief to feel the self-pity and the helplessness be drowned in a sudden rage, one that matched hers.

Aquila grabbed her by her shoulders and threw her up against the wall of the bothy. She glared up at him, equal parts fury and fear. Thunder roared on the heels of the lightning bolt.

When the sound had died, he gritted out, "You are mine," his nose nearly touching hers. "I have let you be for half a year. Now I will take what is mine."

He dropped his head and not so much kissed her as thrust his head against hers so hard that the back of hers struck the wall. She grunted in pain against his mouth. He grabbed her chin and lifted it with one hand, the other continuing to pin her to the wall, and kissed her harder, driving his tongue deep, as the fingers of his other hand dug into her shoulder.

Then he pressed full into her. She was not her sister Rhyanidd, colored like cream and heather-honey, but her features were lovely, even in anger, and there was a subtle ripeness to her small, trim form. He felt her breasts and hips against him through their clothing, and suddenly he was hard as iron and afire in a way he had not been since before the Saxons took everything from him. 

Ness stood like a stone under his assault, a stone with a racing heart. He wondered if she were still a maid, or if she had given herself to the lover, the one who had died nine days ago. He realized he didn't care, didn't want to make this gentle for her, even if he were making one more rod of self-reproach for his own back later.

Both her shoulders were under his hands again, and he pulled her from the bothy wall and threw her to the bed. She landed on her side on the deerskins. Her eyes were wide, her nostrils flaring, her breasts rising and falling under her kirtle. Only a small part of his mind said, _Hold; this is unworthy of you,_ but her next words silenced even that small voice:

"Is this what you want, _my lord?_ " The title was mockery on her tongue. "Is this the tender love-making I missed all autumn and winter? Ambrosius should have thrown you a few sesterces and sent you down to the inns of Uroconium to buy a whore instead; that seems to be about all you're capable of handling."

She knew what she was saying, and there was a bitter gleam of triumph in her eyes when he strode to the bed. It guttered as her head swung backwards with his slap, but when she had caught her breath and lifted her head again, her pale cheek stained with the mark of his hand, it had flared anew.

"And you prove me right. You don't want a wife, you wretch. Do you even want a _woman?_ Do you … _consort,_ perhaps, with a handsome one among Ambrosius's _Companions?_ " The word, which should have never but shone bright and brave, dropped from her lips like an unspeakably filthy thing cast into a midden.

The rain grew louder, and his blood pounded in his ears, as if both conspired to protect him from the edge of her tongue.

"… _Na,_ I think not," she reconsidered, her grin wide and terrible. "I don't think you want anyone who can speak, who could tell you what a loathsome wreck of a man you are. Rhyanidd shouldn't have killed the pig for Ambrosius; she should have saved it for you to fuck instead."

He drew a breath. Between that one and the next he was above her on the bed, hands pinning her wrists to the skins and his mouth hard on hers. She writhed hard under him, and the tilt of her hips into his loins elicited a groan from him half-lost against her mouth.

He let go of her wrists briefly, only to tear the front of her kirtle open. She shrieked and colored slightly but her expression was entirely of rage. Her breasts were small, taut, pale, with dark nipples that he instinctively dropped his mouth to. He was ungentle, sucking and biting, leaving the marks of his fingers against her breast-skin. She had begun to move under him, almost swaying between his body and the bed, and it made him dizzy.

Her breast captive in one hand, he ran the other under her skirts, not stopping to stroke knee or thigh but moving straight to the center of her body. Under the softness of hair his fingertips disappeared into a cleft of heat and moisture. Ness went rigid again under him. He found what he was looking for, a tiny point of flesh, and he looked into her face with a cruel sort of triumph as he pressed it, back and forth, to and fro. 

Her eyes closed.

"Look at me, Ness," he hissed. He didn't expect her to obey, but she did, and her eyes were shockingly dark in her face. "You are going to spend against my hand, and then I am going to take you."

Her face flushed, her lips fell open. He had thought perhaps her body was responding without her heart joining it, as his had done for so many years, but it dawned on him as her hips continued to move in small circles, will-she nill-she, that this might not be entirely true. 

Another small part of his mind whispered, _Leave her on the bed to whimper. Go out in the storm and find a tree as if you were going to piss, and fist yourself there instead._

He couldn't.

He found himself mouthing her nipples again, pulling hard on them as she writhed more strongly and began to moan. She was slippery and swollen now to his touch, and the tiny nodule seemed to sink into all that lushness. He pressed harder, sucked harder, moved his fingertips faster as he felt her begin to shudder—

Of a sudden she cried out, her body going rigid, then trembling for a long minute. 

She lay on the bed and glared up at him, hot and hateful. She still breathed hard; her nipples were stiff and glistening from his mouth, her skirts rucked up about her thighs.

He shoved his tunic up about his waist, pushed up her skirts further, seized her beneath the knees, splayed her, and plunged into her. No barrier impeded him.

She did not move at all now. She lay perfectly still, her hard eyes locked onto his face. It didn't matter; he wasn't going to last. Not a minute after entering her, he uttered a groan and his body jerked spasmodically; his fingers dug hard into the backs of her thighs to anchor himself. He felt his seed course into her, flood atop flood.

Her eyes lost expression and she turned her head to the side. She stared at nothing again, but without glassiness and with a sardonic twist to the corner of her lips.

Aquila eased out of her and off her and yanked his tunic down about his hips. He sat on the edge of the bed, away from her, staring at the floor. He wished he had listened to that first small part of his mind. He wished he had chosen Rhyannid instead. He wished Ambrosius had ordered Brychan to marry one of Cradoc's daughters instead. He wished he had never found Flavia again, never met Brother Ninnias. He wished Thormod had killed him in Jutland.

He wished he had died with his father.

The silence in the bothy seemed louder to him than the blast of the rain and the moan of the wind. He knew he should say something to Ness, because else she might go days without saying a word to him, he knew. All he could think to say was, "You… were no maid."

"No, I was not, my lord," she said tonelessly. "I gave my maidenhead to Gruffydd long before you ever knocked on my father's door. And I am glad of that, because even though we fumbled like the children we were and he hurt me and he did not make me spend, he did love me, and I him." She paused, then continued, her voice unchanged, "And he had the first joy of me, and not you."

He made no reply.

"Will you send me back to my father?" she asked, half-mockingly, half-hopefully.

Heartbeats of silence passed.

"No," he said, turning his head slightly to look at her. Her mouth straightened, and a light, however faint, seemed to die out of her eyes.

"No," he repeated dully, looking at the floor again. "I took you from Powys not for my sake, but for the sake of Britain, at the command of my lord. I will not undo the bonds I have created. I cannot blame you for having given yourself to the man you thought you would marry. I do not fear that you will play me false and present me with another man's child to raise."

He rose off the bed. She did not speak, and he said no more. 

He moved to the window and watched the blackthorn branches flail in the wind like a scourge in hand, the gusts tearing white petals from the blooms. A flickering tongue of lightning lit the air about them as they skittered hither and yon like fireflies. When the wind stopped to catch its breath, the petals it had abandoned began a slow descent to the earth, where they settled against damp dirt or grass, and, in saturation and the dark of night, ceased to shine and no longer caught the eye.


End file.
